9th February 2000 Archive

Browse by publication date, or search the site.

Chip shortage knocks Tosh off top notebook slot

My, aren't these vendors so polite to Intel?

The latest Dataquest report for Europe shows that Toshiba, top dog in the notebook market since the man and his dog were a boy and his puppy, have been displaced by Compaq. The quarterly report from Dataquest, run in the Wall Street Journal, says that Tosh now only has 16.3 per cent of the market, with The Big Q holding 17.2 per …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 07:53
AMD, CA kiss and canoodle on corporate desktop

The wedge and nothing but the wedge

Yesterday, AMD and Computer Associates announced that Unicenter TNG desktop edition will be bundled with PCs using Athlons and K6-2s at no charge from 1 March. While one swallow does not make a summer, the move is significant, but not really for Computer Associates. Unicenter is one of those corporate enterprise desktop …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 08:14
Northamber profit squishes Y2K bug

Increases dividend for what was meant to be the industry's trading black hole

UK broadline distributor Northamber very nearly bucked the trend of the rest of the IT industry by riding the wave of Y2K sluggishness and turning in some healthy figures for the last six months of 1999. For the six months ending 31 December pre-tax profit was £3.4 million, for the same period in the previous year that figure …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 09:29
Paul McCartney account details leaked on second user PC

Red faces at blue blood bank

An obsolete PC sold on by a blue blood bank "contained 108 files relating to Sir Paul McCartney's private cash dealings". The PC was released into the second-user market without first being wiped clean of data relating to money movements in Sir Paul's account. According to The Express, merchant bankers Morgan Grenfell Asset …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 10:38
UK shares bulletin board faces legal bullet

The legal scribbling could be on the wallpaper

Popular shares site Hemscott, run by Hemmington Scott, is facing legal action from a wallpaper company, the Daily Mail reports. Walker Greenbank is threatening to sue Hemmington Scott for alleged defamation published on its bulletin board, and it wants Hemscott to reveal the identities of the message posters, who often use pen …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 10:53
Gumzilla gums Blairzilla

Gum, gum gum gum gum

The august Houses of Parliament debated biogradable chewing gum yesterday, and why we don't have any. Perhaps our Mr Tony Blair should ring up his mate Michael Dell. Because last Friday he took a massive private investment in the spun-off bit of re-branded Monsanto that looks after GM sugar and something called biogum. Funny, we …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 11:03
L&H unveils Linux speech engine

Goodbye GUI, yellow SUI?

Lernout & Hauspie has unveiled its automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech engines running on a prototype CyberGenie 2400 from Cygnion (a spin-off from Ericsson that is now funded by the WK Technology Fund). At the Demo 2000 meeting at Indian Wells, Cal. L&H claimed a first for its large-vocabulary engine, which runs on …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 11:03
Intel to become Toyzilla™ for Barbie, Ken

Smart toys? What's wrong with a doll or a gun?

Intel engineers are building toys at a skunkworks which Mattel, makers of Barbie and Ken, The Washington Post reports. The deal, according to the often amusing piece, is because kids of today want challenging and innovative toys rather than those tired old favourites, dolls and guns. Intel Play, the existence of which we have …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 11:35
Warner threatens Harry Potter fan sites

Our URLs, not yours

Warner Brothers is setting the attack dogs on Harry Potter fan Web sites. The media giant which has film rights to two Harry Potter books, is demanding that Web sites such as harrypotterisawizard.co.uk transfer their names to the company. More than 50 Web sites are devoted to JK Rowling and her blockbusting Harry Potter books …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 12:22
Compaq, Dell, Gateway sued over comms patent

Other PC makers also in the firing line for royalties

Three of biggest names in the PC industry have become embroiled in a patent row over the simultaneous broadcast of voice and video over data links. A company called Multi-Tech Systems is alleging that Compaq, Dell and Gateway have infringed its patents and is said to be seeking an unspecified sum in damages. According to the Dow …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 12:29
AMD share price tipped for $56 by YE

Meanwhile Sanders sells half a million

The share price of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) closed at $41.375 on Wall Street last night, as yet another broker gave it the thumbs up. Broker Needham and Co has repeated its advice to buy and estimated that in a twelve month period the stock could be worth as much as $56. AMD's share price has, however, gone through the roof …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 12:46
Reuters to put its core business on the Internet

How sure are we this is a smart idea?

Pinch us. Reuters stock has been climbing since yesterday when, according to a Reuters report, so it must be true, it announced a £500 million plan to shift its core business to the Internet. This sort of announcement, by anybody, usually does have a happy effect on the stock price, but depending on what you reckon Reuters' core …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 13:15
Massed hack attack hits major Web sites

Amazon, CNN, eBay hit hard -- no site safe from further action

No Web site is safe from the kind of massed denial of service attacks that have hit Amazon.com, CNN.com, Buy.com, eBay and Yahoo! this week, the head of security at anti-virus specialist Network Associates' PGP Security unit said yesterday. "At least one person or a group of people have the ability to take down a site at any …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 13:16
Upstart Amazon gets very own FTC investigation

But only a little one, into a sub...

Things move a lot faster in the dotcom world than elsewhere, so we shouldn't be surprised that Amazon has just managed to achieve its very own FTC investigation. And how long did Microsoft and Intel have to work at it before the Feds took an interest? But things are cool in the dotcom world too, so it's an "informal" …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 13:17
Compaq's build your own Linux PDA project

Doesn't the Samsung one look remarkably similar?

Could the appearance of a Samsung StrongARM-based Linux PDA the other day be in some way related to Compaq's Itsy project? Compaq inherited the Itsy, "an open development platform," from Digital, and continues to run it as a research project at the old Digital Western Research Lab, but has no plans to turn it into a product …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 13:18
IBM has very fine clutch of code-names

But it still has no idea what it's doing

Check this one out. Big Blue US, the company that has comprehensively trashed its PC strategy time after time, decided to send a press release to US hacks last Monday outlining its future notebook and desktop strategy. Big Blue EMEA, on the other hand, decided that it didn't want the details broadcast in Europe, and that it …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 13:18
Geldof and Moore plug WapWorld

Celebrity Endorsement Watch: Part 1 of an occasional series

Sir Bob Geldof, dot-com avatar, is joining the WAP phone scrum with Brian Moore, former England rugby union international and current city solicitor to the rich and famous. They are promoting WapWorld, supposedly Europe's "first free, independent dial-up WAP gateway and portal", The Guardian reports. Moore and Saint Bob will use …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 13:26
Intel Bunny Suit no protection against deep freeze

It's cold over there in Nebraska

We are pleased to report that the Intel Bunny Suit that Doug Thomsen won in our once-in-a-lifetime competition has arrived, safe and sound, in Nebraska. But it will be some months before Doug will be able to wear said golden Bunny Suit, because it seems that the weather is inclement over there. Mr Thomsen won the prize after he …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 14:53
WStore offers 99% discount on PCs – kinda

Oops!

WStore admitted yesterday that it had been hit by a serious glitch on Monday when it started selling top-of-the-range PCs for just a few quid. PCs normally priced at £1,200 were being offered for just £12.00 - just one per cent of their true cost. The glitch affected 90 per cent of the items available on the site and the …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 15:32
EU to investigate Windows 2000

'Several complaints'

The European Union said today that it will investigate Microsoft over alleged market dominance arising from the launch of Windows 2000. The EU is examining claims that W2K will give Microsoft an unfair advantage in ecommerce as well as software, in Europe. The software giant has four weeks to respond to enquiries instigated by …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 15:37
Intel could revisit Socket Seven

Unbelievable? Not completely and not entirely

Sources at a Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer said today that Intel engineers are working on a subset of the Socket Seven market. If true, and Intel could not be contacted at press time, for a confirm or deny, this means that the company has completely reversed out of its Slot One strategy only to drive back into its old …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 15:50
Murdoch gang rejigs Net offering

Some people don't change their socks this frequently

News International has got an Internet strategy. Another one. This time, Rupert Murdoch's monster media company has set up a separate outfit to handle the development of its online strategy. But far from simply migrating its content -- The Sun, Times et al -- online, News Network Ltd is planning to create a number of e- …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 15:57
Cromwell falls under InterX spell

Merger puts £226m tag on Broadvision Wannabe

InterX, the parent company of UK distributor Ideal Hardware and hardware info site the IT Network, is to merge Cromwell Media into its operations. The deal sees InterX hand over 11.94 million shares to Cromwell, priced at £11.80 each at the close of play yesterday, in return for the remaining 63 per cent of the company – it …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 16:32
Sony confesses PlayStation 2 won't play all PSX 1 games

And that could mean a lot of unplayable titles

Sony has admitted that the upcoming PlayStation 2 may not be quite as backwardly compatible as the consumer electronics giant has previously claimed. According to a Bloomberg report, Sony Computer Entertainment director Kenichi Fukunaga said some older titles may not run on the new console after all. Potential problems with the …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 17:22
It ain't so heavy, it's my Novell

Lagom -- it reads better in Swedish

Novell appears to have caught wind of some Microsoft announcement next week, and has come up with a little spoiler launch of its own -- four new products designed to please NetWare ang NDS users. Java has evidently grown up enough for Novell to have developed its look-up-and-connect eGuide product in that language. Since it …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 20:54
Cash Register: Jan 4-31, 2000

All the news that's print to fit

31 Jan 2000 Freeserve is in talks to buy Dorling Kindersley, after it was reported that the publisher issued a profits warning last week. Sources claim that Freeserve boss, John Pluthero, could be about to part with £500 million in cash and shares for the for P B Bear to Star Wars publisher. 27 Jan 2000 Former MD of Sunday …

Business 9 Feb 2000, 23:19